Unfortunately, the DMC FZ10 is not a good choice for IR imagery. (Kurt Horsley, dpreview, Panasonic forum)
Frank `freakboy' (Yahoo! Panasonic forum, 19 March 2004)...
A hot mirror is in all newer digital cameras...the Canon G1 is a great camera, but it is old enough that it dosen't have a hot mirror. What it does is it blocks out ir (infra-red) light. The way you can test your camera is by turning your digital camera on, use a palm pilot that has ir beam, or a cell phone or whatever. Initiate this beam and look at the beam point with your camera. If you see this light flashing, you can see the ir beam, so there is no hot mirror in the camera. they say hot mirror (the tecnical name) but what it is in lay-mans terms is a filter. It just filters out ir, so if you try this with our camera, we have the filter and obviously you won't see the beam.The testing procedure is illustrated at CameraShed. I found that the FZ10 does actually see the IR light on one of my remote controls. However, various FZ10 users on dpreview reported that they could also see the IR light, but had very poor results using the Hoya R-72 filter.
strat (FZ10 gallery) (Yahoo! Panasonic forum, 11th April 2004)...
On Program {exposure mode} {and using an infra-red filter} you simply get a black frame. If you set it on Manual {exposure mode} and open up about 9 stops you do get a pretty well exposed image. Then you need to go to use an imaging program and either pick a channel or do channel mixing. Botton line however is that compared to what an Oly {Olympus} 2100 or a Nikon 5700 give you with an IR-72 filter it scores 3 out of 10 points.
{Image below is an IR image taken by strat. It was probably NOT taken with an FZ10!}
By contrast, Wayne Cosshall had good results with the FZ30 and Hoya R-72.
With post-processing in programs like Adobe Photoshop it is possible to achieve `infra-red effects'. See the example (dpreview, Panasonic forum, 21 March 2004) by Susan `FluziSuzi'. Susan followed instructions found at `IR Photo : the Photoshop way', written by `photo-class'.
Digital Infrared Photography -- Eric Cheng's digital infrared photography page.
